Over the last two decades outdoor navigation devices have been embraced by the general public. Satellite navigation using the GPS and Glonass satellites became available to consumers initially in the form of dedicated navigation devices, but has really taken off following the introduction of such functionality in smartphones. Apart from providing directions, e.g. in car navigation, such devices are also increasingly being used for providing location aware services.
A similar need for directions and location aware services exists in indoor areas. For example in large indoor complexes, such as hospitals, universities, parking lots, shopping malls, and/or offices.
In an indoor setting satellite based navigation technology generally does not provide sufficient signal strength to be able to perform indoor location determination. For this reason alternative techniques have been developed for position/location determination in indoor settings. Some of these alternative techniques use Radio Frequency (RF) based location determination. Such systems typically make use of multiple radio frequency (RF) transmitters with known locations, also known as anchor nodes or beacons. Other alternative techniques may make use of Visible Light Communication (VLC) transmitters with known locations or beacons which may make use of the usually fairly dense lighting infrastructure.
Similar to an outdoor location system, an indoor location system provides a service to consumers hereafter end-users; a service that end-users will eventually rely on. It is therefore important that the indoor location service is reliable. One aspect of reliability for an end-user is the accuracy of the location that is being reported. Another aspect of reliability is the continuity of the location being reported. A further aspect of reliability is the availability.
Generally an indoor location system will be deployed by a customer that will order such an indoor location system from a supplier. The customer is typically the party that owns/deploys the indoor location system, notably this party may also be the party that offers services based on the indoor location system, but this need not be the case. Consider e.g. a scenario wherein an airport owner also owns and deploys an indoor location system. Airlines and shops that are not necessarily affiliated with the airport owner could offer services based on the indoor location system. Hereafter offering such location based services will be called providing services by a service provider.
The deployment of an indoor location system will generally incur cost on the customer; as a result the customer will want to make sure that he can recuperate this cost. The cost can be earned back through the services provided based on the location system functionality. In the above example the airport owner will need to recover his investment from the providers that offer services based on the location system. As a result a mechanism is needed that supports such a diverse and complex scenario as the above airport. For paying location based service providers it is important that there are no free-riders; the system therefore also needs to be tamper-resilient.
The document US2015/0030157, reference [1] describes techniques for trusted location application and location provider communications. The techniques convey location information between a location provider and a trusted location application within a mobile device through trusted communications to preclude its provision to an untrusted location application. A mobile apparatus includes a processor component and the location provider for execution by the processor component comprising a location baseband unit to determine a current location in a venue based on wireless signals received from a location network of the venue, a verification component to verify a trusted location application associated with the venue based at least on credentials received from the trusted location application, and an encryption component to encrypt location information indicating the current location and convey the location information to the trusted location application through a location manager interposed between the location provider and the trusted location application based on verification of the trusted location application.